I’m sure Mr. Joe Justin won’t mind me borrowing the song title idea for this post entry especially as a follow up to his Take Me To The River earlier…[who can name the artists of both songs without Googling the answer?  a bag of Butte County rice in it for the first correct guess…maybe even some Sutter County peaches if you’re ‘in the building’] 

I spent part of Tuesday afternoon with Governor Schwarzeneggar, DWR, Army Corps and others out on the Yolo County levee here in the 2nd Assembly District, near Knights Landing, cited in the Justin post and Bee article, viewing the rock placement work being done there.  It is a refreshing example of getting the work done now and worrying about a lot of obstructions later.  The 29 most critical sights of erosion on levees are the focus of decisive action taken by the Governor, declaring a state of emergency on them.  If you could have seen the birds-eye-view of the mass volume of water up against this levee and all over the Sacramento Valley just a few months ago, from the helicopters that a few of us legislators toured in, at the Governor’s invitation, along with US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, you too would be relieved and thankful for this declaration by the Governor.

Normally, it takes months or worse, years to do the permitting, environmental mitigation, habitat restoration etc. to get started on a levee project, even on a decades old existing levee.  Can’t disturb the bugs and shrubs you know.  Or the enviro groups will sue you, and they’ll find a judge somewhere, one of those rare individuals that can see the invisible ink in the Endangered Species Act that the rest of us cannot, that upholds this pattern of protecting the species du jour from any kind of project that moves dirt and rocks.  So local, state and federal agencies become paralyzed by fear of these lawsuits unless they dance the dance and spend the extra exponential dollars that all this costs to do a simple project, such as levee repair and maintenance or highways, etc.

‘Normally’ there must be an ‘imminent danger’ declared by state and federal agencies to commence repairs without out all that red tape, which means that communities must wait while a levee degrades til the point that it’s only hours from collapse, at which point then you may move in the trucks, tractors and rock to shore up the levee structure enough to, hopefully in time, save the people and property that are in the shadow of that levee zone, from its collapse.  And this usually occurs in the middle of the night, during the heavy rain, when it’s least handy to move in the necessary people, equipment and materials, at much greater danger to everyone, having to drive dump trucks in reverse, sometimes miles down soggy levees and entry roads, and at triple the cost…instead of doing it in an orderly fashion during summer and low water levels.
  
That’s the beauty of the Guv’s emergency declaration..we can fix these known critical spots now, summertime, and greatly reduce risk to people and property and save dollars that can go for even more lineal feet of levee repair. 

What is the long term solution…other than changing the legislature’s majority and the ESA?
Well, a couple of my colleagues and I did run bills to streamline levee repair or the costs of doing so, with little success in Assembly committees.  We tried from different angles, some more far reaching, some more modest.  I even had one bill that would simply allow that in some cases that if we ‘mess up’ one acre of habitat that it would only have to be replaced or mitigated by one acre of permanent new set aside habitat, not 2-1 or 3-1 or 15-1 etc. which can drive costs through the roof when we are speaking of acquiring new land in this state.  So, a spokesman for one of the enviro groups opposed, was testifying in committee against my bill and the lowering to a one to one mitigation ratio, and actually said, "Well, one acre doesn’t always equal one acre"   

Ladies and gentlemen, there we have it, thank you very much!  Liberal enviro logic doing Sacramento math.  But I reckon it all really depends on what the definition of is is.  [Do you think it’s bad form to laugh out loud as your bill is about to get whacked in committee?  Oh, and the ‘disturbed habitat’ we are talking about anyway is on the #@$%!# man-made levee we are trying to fortify, not some pristine meadow someplace.  It grew there once, it’ll grow back!]  

The state has already lost one lawsuit on this issue, the Paterno case, an award of $428 million to those suffering losses of 3 loved ones and property damage from when the levee blew in Yuba County in 1996 from several days of flood stage waters seeping through a mitigation sight. 

There was years of warning of the need to shore up the levee in the area but the paralysis of goverment agencies responsible, from the presence of elderberry bushes, the host plant of the ‘endangered’ Longhorn elderberry beetle, caused no repair work to be allowed until mitigation could be funded and performed first, relying on luck that high flows would not occur.  The luck ran out in December 1996 on 3 people’s lives, thousands of landowners and businesses and the taxpayers of California.  Best of all, no beetles actually lived in the area, it was just ‘necessary’ to keep the plants in place should a beetle happen by.

As these sights are shored up this summer thanks to the Governor’s emergency action, we can point to them as a common sense success of the government fulfilling it’s highest and first obligation, providing for the public’s safety. Let us see if we can then reform the laws to allow us to do so on a regular basis, the work needed to timely maintain, to "rock on" these vital infrastructures, with no true loss environmentally and some respect finally for the cost to the taxpayer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.